Someone trying to sell you a bespoke blogging application for your site?
David Rosam on May 30 2007 at 9:34 am | Filed under: Blogging, Search Engine Optimization
From time to time we see sites that have bespoke blogs. Indeed, for many reasons that I shan’t go into here (profit?), suppliers of Web sites often offer their client a bespoke blogging application.
While in some cases, such a solution may integrate better with the rest of the site, the leading blogging platforms such as Wordpress and Movable Type are mature and powerful, offering just about everything you’d need. For what it’s worth, I’ve used both over a period of many years but I choose Wordpress these days. Indeed my two most used blogs (Dangerous Thinking and Meals on Blogs) are both Wordpress-based.
If you’re planning on using on a blog for SEO reasons, there’s one absolute killer in favour of using one of the mainstream blogging platforms - they have reliable protection against comment spam, when some of the bespoke platforms we’ve seen do not. (I’m assuming the bespoke platform will generate clean HTML, offer RSS feeds and give you comparable publishing flexibility.)
Why am I stressing comment spam protection? If you’ve not run a blog before and haven’t suffered under the onslaught of porn and dodgy pharmaceutical vendors, you may not appreciate the true implications of not having spam protection.
Earlier this year, Bad Behavior (one of the anti-spam measures I’ve experimented with) reported over 3000 attempted comment spams in just 7 days on this very blog. Think about the overhead of deleting each of those manually. I just let the software do the business.
So before you allow yourself to be lured into having a bespoke blogging package installed for you, at least be very clear you will have adequate comment spam protection. Whether I use Akismet alone, or a combination of Akismet and Bad Behavior, the result is the same - no comment spam finding its way on to this blog. And hardly any intervention required from me.
With comment spam out of the frame, it allows me to get on with blogging. I’m sure that’s what you’ll want to do with your blog, too.
